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Sneak Peek on Gallery 3.0 - First Technology Preview

Submitted by valiant on Mon, 2009-02-02 18:26

After just three months of development, the first public release of Gallery 3.0 is here! Gallery 3.0 Alpha 1 is a technology preview release with most features in place and ready to take a test drive with you.
It was back in October at the Gallery Sprint when the Gallery crew set out to create a new Gallery application with simplicity in mind. Three months have passed, the new Gallery version is up and running and indeed much easier to use, customize and extend.

Thanks for your continued support! Read on for more details...

Intended Audience

The intended audience of this release are enthusiasts, designers
and module developers. This is the right time to do a test drive
with the improved user interface and to start developing feature
extensions and designing new themes.

Note:

A series of key features are yet to be added (e.g. a way to
reset a forgotten password).

There is no guaranteed upgrade path yet. You might be forced to
reinstall Gallery 3 to use the next public release.

Security Warning

This is the first technology preview of Gallery 3.0 and as such it is not intended to be installed on public websites yet. The application has not undergone a professional security audit yet and may have serious security vulnerabilities. Please contain your excitement and wait for the final release before you share your test drive with the world! :-)

Try It Yourself

Simplicity Is King

Let's have a closer look at Gallery 3.0 to see why it's so much easier and more fun to customize and extend Gallery 3.0 and how our user centric development process ensures that the user interface is not an afterthought.

Scope and Target Audience - Before starting development on Gallery 3.0, the target audience and the scope of the application have been clearly defined. Gallery 3 is not a general purpose web application handling any file format you throw at it. And it's not supported on every web platform that exists.
Prudent decisions helped to simplify the product at a very early stage. For instance, there are no longer item-level permissions. Permissions are managed on an album level. This simplified many aspects, from the database, over scalability, up to the user interface.

Simple to Use - We're glad to have usability and user interface experts on our team, designing and prototyping interfaces that just make sense, avoiding the dreaded text deserts you might remember from past incarnations of Gallery. Emphasis is on making simple, frequent tasks really quick and simple, and having everything well organized. The new admin dashboard is a good example of this principle.

Size Matters - Gallery 3.0 is currently a mere 3.5MB (uncompressed on your disk), with all its features. Compare that to the 16.5MB of Gallery 2.3's bare bones minimal package. It wouldn't be fair to compare it to the full Gallery 2.3 package (37MB without, 89MB with translations). Leaving out some levels of abstraction really helps to lose some weight!

On Shoulders of Giants... - Gallery 3.0 wouldn't be possible without the great advances of recent years.

Gallery 3.0 is built on top of Kohana, a PHP 5 framework that makes PHP application development a breeze. Kudos to the folks from Kohana for their support and for providing this first class application framework!

Kohana's prowess in elegance and simplicity couldn't be achieved without the vast improvements of PHP 5 over PHP 4. We're glad we can finally seize the full power of PHP 5 and say PHP 4 finally goodbye.

Remember the days before jQuery? We wouldn't want to look back either. It was never easier to add interactivity, AJAX or some custom behavior to your user interface than with jQuery. We use jQuery and jQuery UI where we can and JavaScript development couldn't be more hassle-free.

Simple to Customize - Gone are the days of learning 4 different languages (HTML, JavaScript, Smarty, PHP), many different APIs (theme and core API, Gallery 2 smarty tags) and 10 step tutorials to create your own theme. With Gallery 3, you can create your own theme just by copying an existing theme to a new folder. No further changes necessary to make it work. How's that for easy? There's no templating language to learn other than HTML and PHP.

Simple to Extend - We've exercised great discipline in keeping things simple and resisting the urge to engineer general solutions to problems that only a small minority would care about. And it shows in how quick one can come up to speed with Gallery 3.0 and the small size of existing modules. For instance, it takes a small fraction of the code to create a slide show or comments module for Gallery 3 than it takes to implement the same feature set in Gallery 2.

Scope #2, Supported Configurations - Gallery 3 is supported on Linux / Unix servers, running a MySQL 5 and an Apache 2.2 web server with PHP 5.2. Emphasis on supported, not necessarily required. It may well work with MySQL 4.1 on MS Windows as well. But the Gallery team is going to focus its energy on making the best possible product on the supported configurations.

Currently Implemented Features

The following features are implemented and functioning at varying levels.

Basic upload (to be replaced with a wonderful Flash upload widget)

Album browsing

Item commenting, comment moderation

Spam protection with Akismet and Recaptcha

Image toolkit support for ImageMagick, GD, and GraphicsMagick

Theme system, including separate admin theme.

Module system to extend the functionality, and a series of existing modules

Basic metadata boolean search with relevance ranking

Flash-powered slideshow (Cooliris)

Album media RSS feeds

Quick edits of item metadata

In place item deletion and rotation

User group management (drag'n'drop interface)

Basic user permission management

Admin dashboard

Missing Key Features

These features are yet to be added and will be part of the final 3.0 release:

Roadmap

Gallery 3.0 will go under a professional security audit in the next few weeks and there will be at least one beta release about a month from now before the Gallery 3.0 will be released tentatively 6 weeks from now.

Feedback

If you have any overall feedback, please visit the Gallery 3.0 Alpha Feedback forum topic and let us know! If you have questions, please visit the Gallery 3 Wiki, the future home for Gallery 3 documentation.

So far, this is already a definite improvement!! Everything is much easier to use.

One thing, though....how do you add a photo? When I upload a photo nothing happens! The upload box just stays there and I can't do anything except for clicking the "X" icon at the top to close the window. The title and caption gets posted, but not the picture.

Perhaps the path to my imagemagick is not set correctly?

Submitted by valiant on Tue, 2009-02-03 16:12.

@skunker:

close the upload form, open it again and enter a name / title. i saw this issue occur when i left out name / title.

the current upload form is only a temporary solution, it will be replaced with a really nice UI pretty soon.
thus there didn't go a lot of effort into that form. it doesn't handle things very gracefully.

(if you want to add a whole album tree at once, similar to g2's "add from server", then you can use g3's nightly snapshot where we include "scaffold" in the top menu, which has a few power-tools, which aren't intended for the general public and thus have a really poor UI and no access control.

Submitted by sendhil76 on Tue, 2009-02-03 16:41.

Just awesome...every which way i can think!!

Thanks for an awesome product! Will download an install locally to test drive the new incarnation that is Gallery 3

Submitted by Nosaj on Tue, 2009-02-03 16:46.

Excellent!

Any screenshots available so those of us without a test machine now can see the new GUI, tools, and layouts?

Submitted by aaanorton on Tue, 2009-02-03 17:16.

valiant wrote:

@cmjimmy:

> is that correct that it is no longer supporting multi-site setup?

much simpler, isn't it?

Yes, much. But what if you need, you know, multiple sites?

Thanks for this preview!

Submitted by cmjimmy on Tue, 2009-02-03 17:23.

Thanks valiant,

Actually, with a shared code base, I found the multi-site setup pretty handy with test sites or private sites. Of course, I can understand not everyone love the single configuration apply to all.

Anyway, not too hard for me....

Submitted by valiant on Tue, 2009-02-03 18:35.

@cmjimmy:
installation / upgrade automation tools will be much easier to build with gallery 3 than with gallery 2.
we commit to 1-step install / upgrade processes, and we'll probably provide a command line upgrade script as well, just as we let you install g3 from the command line.
this means that it's really easy to write your wrapper script which first creates an empty database and then calls the g3 install script with the db config as parameters.

i'm sure people will publish some productivity tools around the command line install / upgrade scripts to manage something like multisites.

This is an exciting stage for gallery. I started at G1... fell in love with G2 and cannot wait to play around with G3.

Kudos and thanks to the team!

Regards

Simon B

Submitted by khedron on Wed, 2009-02-04 00:01.

@valiant:

The question of G1 migration is exactly what I wanted to know too. If G1 to G3 migration is more than, say, a month away, I'll probably bite the bullet, since what I really want is iPhoto-to-Gallery migration powers so I can change my current picture workflow.

Submitted by Boogerhead on Wed, 2009-02-04 02:46.

Very exciting! Thanks.

Just, for what it's worth -- I'm running Gallery2 on Apache/MySQL/PHP5, but under Windows (using XAMPP). Just ... it'd be nice when the dust settles if there's an installer system for Windows that at least gets created, even if major resources aren't thrown at it. I also know some Gallery2 users who experiment with similar setups at home.

Submitted by cmjimmy on Wed, 2009-02-04 02:48.

Thanks valiant,

This is also one of my thoughts. The multi-sites (in Gallery 2) basically are some "pointers" back to the code base.

Submitted by durianjc on Wed, 2009-02-04 04:43.

i vote for the feature that allow guest to register and then have his own album. which is best diff to other open source galleries and is the reason i chose G2.

There are dates on the various milestones, but realistically at some point we're going to delay the release until we get some of the bits written. The alpha 2 date is probably a little aggressive considering our available time, but we're going to keep aggressive dates and keep plugging away

Submitted by cmjimmy on Thu, 2009-02-05 05:39.

That's fine for me without the multi-site functionality.

TA

Submitted by Sundog_AK on Thu, 2009-02-05 05:57.

I found that during install that if you get a server 500 error with your server log indicating that it is a "SoftException in Application.cpp:252: File index.php is writeable by group" error, that you need to double check that your file permissions are set to 755 for directories and 644 for files. I am not sure why it wasn't that way after extraction, since I have never had this issue with other installs (i.e., others are always set 755/644 by default. Anyway, in case someone else has same issue.

Submitted by cewan on Thu, 2009-02-05 07:14.

From the road map it looks as though there will be no more work done on adding/uploading pictures for 3.0. Is that right? I really want the "add from local server" feature!

Submitted by bharat on Thu, 2009-02-05 07:39.

@cewan: I agree, this is a nice feature to have. But we have limited time and a lot of other stuff on the list. Tell me what I should take off the list to make room for that feature Seriously, though this is an important feature and we'll work on it, but it might not make it into 3.0.

Submitted by cewan on Thu, 2009-02-05 08:05.

Thanks for your reply! There are a number of things that I could do without, but it is probably not a good idea to change the road map this close to the release.
I'll just wait for 3.1 and continue to use good old G2 for now

Submitted by Dylan Leblanc on Thu, 2009-02-05 23:55.

Will G3 be able to use the same scripts for user integration as G2 uses? I have created some scripts using the GalleryEmbed class to embed G2 into my website and am hoping I can reuse these with G3.

Submitted by talmdal on Fri, 2009-02-06 02:52.

@Dylan Leblanc: probably not. G2 and G3 are architected completely different. It would like asking if the scripts created for G1 could work in the g2 environment.

@cewan: "add from local server" is a must have for me as well. I have some code started for that feature, but the priority slipped abit. Someone else might be looking at it ( I gave him my code as a starting point), and if he doesn't do anything with it, I'll probably pick it up again and squeeze it in as well.

@Dayo: When I takes photos I always have my gps unit with me to log where the photo is taken.
I have photos taken in Japan, South Korea, Europe and USA and Google Maps simplifies browsing among the photos.

So far it is only possible to add one picture at a time according to the interface? We need an import G2 feature that has an option to convert 'keywords' to 'tags'.

Those type of pull down menus have the 'z-index bug' in most browsers. Not that I cant use firefox to get arround it, but for those who cant, they really should not be used in combination with flash or other heavy elements that will trigger this bug. Or perhaps this whole paragraph is irrelevent if planned upgrade in the upload ui fixes this.

Honestly, the G3 has great possibilities, and I think it will soon better the long beloved G2.

Another thing to consider for the actual release, perhaps a revamp in the slideshow module? It really needs to have options for recursing all albums instead of just one (IMO).

lond
Of course people use tags and google maps but the devs have said G3 is going to focus on what most use and I'll wager more people use and need to be able to upload more than one image at a time than using google maps which is why I made the tongue-in-cheek suggestion to Bharat

So far it is only possible to add one picture at a time according to the interface? Doesnt matter, it logs me out before I can add any lol. We need an import G2 feature that has an option to convert 'keywords' to 'tags'.

I'd rather see G3 convert G2-tags to G3-tags. There's a maintenance task in G2 that converts keywords to (G2-)tags.

Submitted by ultravista on Fri, 2009-02-06 15:35.

Excuse me if this has been covered ...

Will a shopping cart with PayPal support be part of G3?

I rely on G2 & PayPal to sell photos, the same feature in G3 is essential (at least for me).

@ultravista: shopping cart with paypal support is not currently on the core feature list. That's not to say someone won't step up and develop it.

There is some functionality that is in the core product and will eventually get there given enough time and resources. These are the trade offs that Bharat was mentioning previously.

Having said that, we are trying to limit the amount of code we as a team support and are looking for more involvement from the community in developing specialized functionality. This is why we are striving to make new module creation simpler.

So there will be some functionality, just as there is in Gallery2, that is not part of the core product and is not supported by the Gallery team. The gallery-contrib SourceForge project is where this code resides for Gallery2 and our plan is to either continue to use this repository or set up a similar repository for g3 modules and themes. With everything else we are doing, we just haven't gotten there yet.